


Crumpet's Whumptober 2019 Ficlets

by salacious_crumpet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Whump, Whumptober
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 02:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20940770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salacious_crumpet/pseuds/salacious_crumpet
Summary: My collected fics for Whumptober 2019, centred around my own original work (which feels horribly vain of me, but it's been a good writing exercise for me), an urban fantasy/horror based in a fictional tourist town in northern Ontario. The three main characters (because introducing the fourth would involve a lot of spoilers) are the polyamorous triad of Luke, a sort of paladin; Charlie, a magical healer; and Kate, a shapeshifting berserker.Each chapter contains its own specific warnings in the author's note, but these are Whumptober prompts, so there will be blood, violence and other horrible things.





	1. Day 1 - Shaky Hands + "Wake Up!"

**Content Warning:** Reference to past torture; implications of abusive parent/child relationship; self-harm ideation (with no on-page follow-through); some F-bombs

**Characters:** Luke, Bear (the dog)

There was a warm, heavy weight on his legs when Luke startled back to wakefulness, and for a brief moment the panic from his nightmare bled over into reality and he thought he was still being pinned down. Before he could start fighting off his would-be attacker he heard a low whine and the weight shifted until he was able to discern individual paws. Massive, incredibly _heavy_ paws – but familiar paws, nonetheless. 

Dazedly he threw one hand out from under the quilt until his fingers sank into Bear’s thick fur. The dog shifted again, moving off of Luke’s legs until he was lying on the bed beside him, his great big head on the pillow and a waft of deadly doggy breath right in Luke’s face. As wake-ups went Luke had had better, but he’d definitely had worse, as well, and he suspected Bear was waking him up because the massive Leonberger had heard him having a nightmare. Bear wasn’t, strictly speaking, a service dog, but he was certainly well-attuned to the humans (and cats) in his life, and whatever qualifications or certifications he lacked he made up for in sheer enthusiasm. His presence had pulled Luke back from a panic attack on more than one occasion, and he served to ground Luke now. 

“Hey, buddy,” Luke rasped out, his voice hoarse in a way that suggested he’d probably been crying out in his sleep. Bear licked his arm, his heavy, fluffy tail thudding on the quilt. Luke thought about reminding the dog that he wasn’t supposed to be up on the bed – three people in a king-sized bed was more than enough, especially considering that he and Charlie were both more than six feet tall (Kate was tiny but somehow managed to take up more than her fair share of space). Toss in three cats and a dog that weighed nearly two hundred pounds and things got a little crazy. He kept the thought to himself, however, because Charlie was picking up an emergency shift at the clinic and Kate was out on patrol, and Luke’s heart was still beating far too hard and far too fast for him to be alone in bed. 

He sat up and Bear let him, although he whined a little. Luke didn’t get out of bed, however. Instead, he shifted into a cross-legged position and cradled his head in his hands, working hard to get his breathing under control. It should have been easy: he’d been trained in focus techniques his entire life, it should have been second nature to drum up a simple breathing exercise to calm himself down. 

It wasn’t easy. He didn’t have the nightmare often, but whenever he did have it, it felt like an eternity before he calmed down. 

Of all the horrible things that had happened to him in his life – and the list was long – the thing that led to his worst nightmares was just a blip on the radar, comparatively speaking. Just one moment, out of an entire thirteen-day period, that came back to haunt his dreams. Technically speaking it wasn’t even the worst moment in that thirteen-day period. The _worst_ moment – the most painful moment, the moment he was certain his life was over – was when his captors had used magic against him. The Scions of the Unforgiven didn’t consider blood magic taboo, unlike literally _every other_ magic-user out there. It was perfectly acceptable to them to use their enemy’s blood against them, or to use their own blood to power their spells. It made them powerful and dangerous, and it served to reinforce to everyone else why blood magic was evil. 

As if anyone needed the reminder. 

It would have made sense, then, for Luke’s worst memory to be the moment he felt his own blood ignite in his veins as his captors used their magic to burn him from the inside-out. It was terrifying, and horrible, and he’d never experienced pain so bad before or since. And that loss of sense of self had made the experience worse, because of course the Scions had started with his right hand, his _dominant_ hand, and along with the pain had come the knowledge that this wound could cripple him for life – assuming he even made it out of there – and then what would he do? There were no retired Knights of Oberon. You either died gloriously in battle or … Well, that was it, there really wasn’t an “or.” 

Luke let out a painful, shuddering breath, dropping his hands into his lap. Bear whined again, licking his fingers, forcing a shaky laugh out of Luke. The bedroom was dark, the blackout curtains doing their job, but he knew the shape of his own flesh well enough that he didn’t need light to know what was there. His left hand, now somewhat wet and sticky with dog spittle, a faint smattering of scars over his knuckles. His right hand, the skin silvery and tight, but the muscle and bone underneath perfectly healed: function over form, and thank all the gods that Charlie was as practical as he was talented, because that injury should have crippled Luke. Even the best surgeons in the world wouldn’t have been able to repair that damage – but Charlie, with his healing magic, had done that, and for a man he had barely known as anything more than his best friend’s mopey boyfriend. 

And thinking about Charlie and Kate in relation to his injuries and captivity brought him back to the crux of his nightmare. The moment he’d woken up bound and gagged in a musty old barn he’d known he wasn’t going home again, especially not when he’d realized who his captors were. The Scions hated the Knights; the only reason they’d taken him was so that they could torture him to death in the hopes of gaining information about his own people, or so that they could try and ransom him back to the Knights – and the Knights of Oberon did not negotiate with the Scions of the Unforgiven. The enmity between their two groups went back centuries, and the Knights were proud and firm in their beliefs. Luke had grown up hearing tales about Knights who had gone bravely to their deaths rather than spill their order’s secrets, and that was exactly what he’d expected to happen to him. 

So no, it wasn’t the mutilated horror of his right hand that kept him up at night, and it wasn’t the beatings, or the damage to his feet, or any of the other painful, humiliating indignities his captors had thought to visit upon him. What haunted his memories was the moment one of the Scions had woken him with a bucket of cold water and a folded scrap of paper. The water had been dumped over Luke’s head. He’d woken, sputtering and freezing, to an angry man urging him to _“Wake up, you Fae-blooded bastard!”_ before thrusting the scrap of paper in Luke’s face. 

Luke’s hands had been bound behind his back – this had been before they’d used blood magic on his arm – so the paper had fluttered into his lap, where the freezing, stagnant bucketful of water made it stick to his torn and bloodied jeans. The paper had managed to land face up, and he’d immediately recognized his father’s handwriting. Of course his father had been the one to reply to the Scions’ demands: he’d been the Knight in charge while the regular commander had been away on business. Just one sentence, in Daniel Kandarian’s familiar, spiky script: _There is no Knight Lukas Kandarian._

Not only had his own people – his own _family_ – written him off, but the Knights of Oberon had also stripped him, _in absentia,_ of his title. He was nothing to them. 

More than a decade ago, and he still had nightmares about that fucking note and his father’s handwriting. 

“Shit,” Luke huffed out, noticing the way his hands were shaking. He was supposed to be calm. He was supposed to be strong. He wasn’t supposed to let a decade-old nightmare mess him up like this, especially when he knew how the story ended: after the Knights of Oberon had literally written him off, Kate had done what Kate does best and came after Luke herself, like the crazy badass wrecking ball she was. The Knights hadn’t wanted him but the Alliance was more than thrilled to have him, and Kate had pulled together a team to rescue him, because _she_ wanted him and Kate just saw “impossible” as a challenge. Luke had been saved, Charlie had healed him, and the Scions of the Unforgiven could go fuck themselves and so could the Knights of Oberon. 

The knowledge that he was far happier with his life now than he ever would have been had he stayed with the Order did little to slow his racing heart or make his hands stop shaking. He kept seeing that piece of paper falling into his lap, only in his mind’s eye his father’s dismissal was written over and over again, the words overlapping until the page was completely covered in harsh, jagged lettering. 

He wasn’t going back to sleep, and he knew himself well enough to know that if he got up and wandered the house alone – even with Bear’s steady, good-natured presence by his side – his mind was going to take him someplace dark. There was an old straight razor hidden away in the bathroom that had his name on it, or failing that there were dozens of knives and other sharp things in the house. His skin crawled and his hands shook with the need to do something, _anything,_ to carve out the pain and frustration those six words had burned into his soul years ago. 

But he’d made a promise to Charlie and Kate. 

Scrubbing his scarred hand over his face, Luke leaned over the dog – who immediately tried licking his chin – and snagged his cellphone off the bedside table. Charlie was at work and since he was covering a shift for a sick co-worker there likely wasn’t anyone else who could cover for _him_ if he needed to get away in an emergency. Kate was out patrolling for literal monsters in the woods. Her team needed her. 

But Luke had made a promise. 

Luke pet Bear with one hand while he texted with the other, the texture of the dog’s thick fur soothing to his rattled nerves but not enough to bring him out of his spiralling headspace. 

** _I need you to come home._ **

A few seconds later – not even a full minute – Luke’s phone buzzed in response. He lifted it to his face and saw Kate’s picture pop up on the phone’s screen. He checked, and sure enough there was a text message reply. 

_ **On my way.** _

Luke’s shaking hand clenched in Bear’s fur as he let out another ragged exhalation, the phone dropping to land facedown on his lap. He pet the dog with the hand that wasn’t gripping on to Bear like his life depended on it, and used the slow, steady movement to keep himself from going into the bathroom in search of his straight razor. Kate was on her way.


	2. Day 2 - "Bound"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I just could not get the “explosion” prompt to work for me, so I’m using one of the alternate prompts instead because as soon as I saw it I had an idea. Again, this features characters from my original WIP and hasn’t really been edited.

**Content Warning:** graphic injury, blood, a whole lot of swearing

**Characters:** Kate, Luke

Consciousness came like a flash of lightning from a clear sky, only the lightning was white-hot pain and the sky was her body. Kate woke suddenly, a switch being flipped from off to on, and managed to bite back a cry of pain only through sheer force of will. She’d had a lot of rude awakenings in her life, but each one sucked in its own uniquely delightful way. 

She was bound, wrists manacled together over her head and – another muffled groan as she tilted her head back far enough to look up – chained to the cinder-block wall above her. Under normal circumstances the manacles wouldn’t be an issue, even sturdy-built ones like these: she was probably strong enough to rip them loose even if she couldn’t break the bands themselves, and failing that she could shift into something smaller that could just slip free. 

No, the chains didn’t really give her pause. The six-inch-long metal railroad spikes driven through her shoulders, however – yeah, those brought her up short. 

The metal looked to be silver-coated, which … did her captors think she was a fucking werewolf? At least, she was pretty sure they were just silver-coated and not actually _made_ of silver, because silver was actually fairly soft and … okay, this maybe wasn’t the time for her to succumb to one of Syd’s science rants. In any event, there were actual bits of metal stuck through her shoulders, and sure, she could theoretically shift her way free of _those,_ too – if she didn’t mind the metal dragging its way through muscle, bone and skin as she changed into something smaller. That was a sure-fire way to guarantee permanent damage, and frankly, Kate kind of liked having both arms. 

The spikes were only through her shoulders – and that was a sentence she never thought she’d feel relief about – and not through her hands or legs and feet. Her feet were bare and resting on what felt like cold, packed dirt; between her feet on the ground and her hands bound to the wall, her weight was not being supported by the metal spikes, and that was another positive thing in what was otherwise turning out to be a shit-sandwich kind of day. 

Because curiosity had always outweighed self-preservation in Kate’s mind, she gave her bindings a careful tug, testing their strength to see if there was any give. She could feel something grinding in her left shoulder, a sensation that made her stomach give a queasy flip, and suspected the spike was pushing against bone. Otherwise, nothing about her current predicament suggested that there would be an easy way out about this. Shoulders were – despite Hollywood’s tendency to imply otherwise – hardly a safe place for injury; there were a lot of complicated parts and a lot could go wrong with an impalement there. Her captors had clearly missed any of the arteries there, or she would already have bled to death by now, but there were nerves and muscles in there that were pretty obviously damaged, and if she shifted there was no way to be sure she wouldn’t tear the spikes through something vital. It wasn’t the silver that kept her pinned like one of Roxanne’s mounted butterflies, it was the placement of the spikes and the knowledge that she could permanently fuck herself up if she did the wrong thing. 

Of course, if it came between permanent injury and a far worse fate, well, Kate knew what her choice would be. 

Bizarrely, her first real thought was that someone needed to tell Ardyn and the rest of the Alliance that the hunters she and Luke had been sent out to locate were in fact _Hunters._ Not dumbass city boys hoping to bag themselves a deer, but (probably actually still dumbass) men and women who knew about the existence of monsters and were out in the woods to bring them down. As her current predicament demonstrated, Hunters didn’t actually need to be well-educated or _right_ to occasionally be effective. 

Thinking about the reason she and Luke had been out in the woods in the first place made her think about _Luke,_ and for one frantic moment Kate was terrified that he was staked to the wall with her, or worse, that the Hunters had already killed him and dumped his body somewhere. Before she could get too carried away with those fears, however, she managed to get her head turned enough to see off into the shadows to her right – turning her head _hurt,_ both in the way it pulled at the muscles in her neck and back, and in the way the back of her skull brushed against the cinderblock wall, putting pressure on what was sure to be one hell of a goose-egg – where, to her immense relief, her boyfriend was lying in the corner. Unlike her, Luke wasn’t bound and staked to the wall; instead, he was curled up on the ground, his wrists and ankles securely bound with thick rope. 

On the one hand, Kate was glad that Luke was spared the distinctly unpleasant sensation of metal stabbing through his shoulders. On the other hand, _what the actual fuck?_ Chain up the itty-bitty woman, but let’s just use some rope on the guy built like a brick shithouse? She didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended that their captors saw her as the real threat. 

Silly Hunters. They were _both_ the real threat. 

Of course, Luke presently appeared to be unconscious, which was … rather less threatening than usual. She’d like to think that was why she got the vampire/werewolf double-bill treatment and _he_ got to sleep it off in the dirt, but she’d been out cold, too, up until just a few minutes ago. No, for whatever reason their captors knew that Kate was more than just a tiny, apple-cheeked redhead, but they hadn’t figured out that the giant strongman was – actually, scratch that, their captors were _clearly_ idiots if it hadn’t occurred to them that, supernaturally-enhanced or not, the 6’4” muscle-bound biker-looking dude was probably _some_ kind of dangerous. 

That was okay. Kate could work with idiots. 

Across the room – which looked like a set piece from _The Blair Witch Project_ – Luke groaned and then immediately went still as he became aware of his surroundings. Kate cleared her throat, hoping to get his attention before he realized he was bound and started freaking out. 

“Hey, baby,” she said, pitching her voice low in the hopes that only he would hear her. She’d yet to see any sign of their captors, but it was too much to wish that they were nowhere nearby. 

Luke lifted his head and – oh, that was a _lot_ of blood. The entire right side of his face was painted red, and Kate tried not to panic because, let’s face it, Luke’s head bleeds a lot. Yeah, head injuries in general tended to be pretty messy, but it was Kate’s honest opinion that of all the times she’d witnessed them, for whatever reason Luke was the one whose head seemed to bleed the most. Of course, Luke and Charlie were pretty much the only people she gave a shit about and Charlie was smart enough to stay out of the field for the most part, but still. It was like Luke’s skull was a papier-mâché decoration filled with blood. 

“Hey, love,” she said again, watching him squint as he tried to focus on her. “Don’t freak out, okay? I’m –” 

She wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was going to say – some variation of “I’m fine, don’t worry about it,” probably – but that was when Luke realized that he was tied up – and that she was stuck to the wall like a really morbid art installation. One or the other he could have handled fine, but both combined, plus what was no doubt a vicious headache, made him immediately start hyperventilating. 

Luke did not do well with confinement. Granted, most people weren’t exactly cool with it, but Luke _really_ wasn’t cool. 

Telling a panicking person to calm down was probably the least effective way of getting them to calm down, but under the circumstances Kate’s options were somewhat limited, and she didn’t want Luke to hurt himself. She called to him from across the room, trying to get him to breathe normally, to focus on breaking free of the ropes, but Luke’s panic made him flail ineffectually and whatever their captors had done to knock him out had left him uncoordinated and confused. When he finally stopped – lungs heaving with the effort to drag oxygen into his body – he flopped weakly on the ground, face pressed into the dirt. 

Normally Kate was willing to accept the Alliance’s general prohibition on murder. The usual protocol when dealing with newfound Hunters was to try to recruit them, because the Alliance had a sort of “the more, the merrier” outlook when it came to membership (which explained Kate’s presence, frankly). These Hunters, though? Kate was going to rip them limb from limb for putting Luke through this. There wasn’t going to be a heart left beating.


	3. Day 3 - Delirium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Technically speaking this ficlet takes place post-delirium, but it was definitely inspired by the prompt. As a note, however, this is a “sex pollen” fic, or rather, it’s the aftermath of a sex pollen idea, so while the sex occurred between two people involved in a consensual sexual/romantic relationship, the specific encounter was not entirely consensual, and the whump deals with some of the ramifications of that.

**CW:** Post-sex pollen angst; gross references to fluids; sex-related injuries; also, again, a _whole lot_ of swearing

**Characters:** Kate, Luke

All those thirsty “sex pollen” fanfics Kate read never talked about the aftermath, unless it was to say “and then they realized they were really in love the whole time, and so they lived happily ever after, the end.” It was all just searing glances, thinly-veiled innuendo and then ten chapters of hot monkey sex, with a heaping side of emotional revelation. 

On the whole Kate was a fan of the hot monkey sex. The emotional revelation, well, she could take it or leave it, but it was fine in small doses. She enjoyed sex pollen fics because the trope was a convenient excuse to take two (or more) characters and mash them together like Barbie dolls without having to sort out the how and the why of them getting together. Do a little setup where the characters get blasted in the face with some kind of alien (or magical) sex dust, spend a couple paragraphs with them going all “oh no we can’t, we hate each other” or some shit like that, and then follow it up with a bunch of gratuitous smut. She was there for that, one hundred percent, especially when there was the added background knowledge that the characters were actually _really_ secretly into each other. 

In retrospect, she did not particularly care for the whole being “mashed together like Barbie dolls” part, at least not when she was playing the role of Barbie. 

She woke up in the wet spot of an ancient mattress in a cabin that possibly predated Canada’s Confederation. To be fair, the entire mattress was probably one giant wet spot, and frankly the less she thought about _that,_ the better. Luke – the Ken doll to her Barbie – was still passed out beside her, which at least spared her the discomfort of having to meet his eyes post-sex-pollen delirium. 

Looking at the situation analytically – which neither of them had been able to do the night before – it was probably for the best that she and Luke were the ones exposed. It would have been _damned_ awkward if it had been her and Charlie; he might say that he wasn’t about to run screaming from the sight of a vagina, but actually _fucking_ one would have been pushing things. And realistically, Luke and Charlie would have been bad for different reasons: Charlie was a damned-talented charmer, but his body was still just the body of a(n extremely fit) normal human, and Luke’s was … not. If Kate, with her own superior strength and stamina, was in a tremendous amount of pain (and oh, she _was_), Charlie could have been damn near killed. Anyone else, especially anyone mundane? It didn’t bear thinking about. At least she and Luke could keep up with each other, and in their case it wasn’t as though they weren’t already sexually intimate. They might not have been down with the time and the place (or the duration, or the ferocity, or … _y’know what, brain? Let’s just stop right_ there), but at least the who worked for them both. 

Kate sat up with a muffled groan and tried desperately not to think about the way she had to peel herself up off the mattress. Her naked skin was … tacky … and in addition to a number of rather remarkable hand- and fingerprint-shaped bruises, there was also some impressive chafing and … oh, great, that was definitely beard-burn from Luke’s days’ old stubble. And also a rash, from sleeping plastered in … Kate shuddered and stood up. The further she got from the mattress – the scene of the crime – the better. 

Her memories of the past few hours were blissfully dim. She remembered the exposure – Luke, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all things dangerous and supernatural, had been the one to belatedly recognize the plant, just after it had blasted them both in the face with what was _literally_ sex pollen. They had tried to clean it off, jumping in the nearby river, but based on Luke’s readings the contagion was pretty much instantaneous. It took a while for the symptoms to kick in, which at least gave them enough time to sequester themselves in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, but once the fever started, it was _game fucking on._ After that everything was a blur but her body told the story her mind had mercifully forgotten. 

Kate remembered having the presence of mind to talk it over with Luke before the pollen-induced delirium hit. Unsurprisingly he’d been more upset about it than she was, but sex was always going to be complicated for him. She’d made sure he knew that she was comfortable with him doing whatever he needed to do in order to avoid his brain melting into a puddle of goo under the pollen’s influence, and had then reiterated what she knew of his own personal hang-ups and squicks. The last thing she wanted was to trigger him mid-coitus. She wasn’t particularly worried about herself; she could handle it. 

And then there was fever, and the rest of the world had kind of just … melted away in favour of it being just the two of them. After that it was all a whirlwind of delirious fucking, the kind of shit you didn’t see outside of the most depraved videos on PornHub, with an added scoop of two superhumanly strong, agile and tough people going at it like bunnies. Mad, freakishly strong, insanely flexible bunnies. It was amazing the cabin was still standing. 

Morning sunlight filtered in through cracks in the cabin’s wood slats, illuminating Luke from without. Kate always found him beautiful – the man was built like a god, all olive skin and those _glorious fucking muscles_ – but now he looked like something out of a wet dream. _Debauched._ His skin was every bit as bruised and raw as hers, but his darker skin tone made the damage less obvious, and the tattooed sleeve along his left arm and the scarring on his right obscured the bands of bruising around his wrists from her pinning him down. His dark hair – always messy to begin with – was sex-tousled and sweat-damp, his already-full lips swollen and spit-shiny. At the moment Kate wasn’t sure she ever wanted to have sex again – there wasn’t a single part of her body that wasn’t tender and chafed – but looking at him, there was still a faint tingling of arousal that couldn’t entirely be excused by the pollen. He was fucking _gorgeous,_ and only she and Charlie ever got to see him this way. 

Kate stood there for a moment, just staring at Luke. Part of her – a big part, if she was being honest with herself – wanted to get the hell out of there. To find their clothes, burn the cabin to the ground and forget this whole mess had ever happened. The other part, the more reasonable part that had been with Luke for well over a decade and knew most of his quirks and triggers, knew he would need more time to acclimate. He was going to wake up, and he was going to be furious with himself for every bruise he saw on her body, never mind the fact that he had his own bruises to match and that they were _both_ as delirious when everything went down. He was going to let his Order-raised guilt take over, add in a heaping dash of childhood trauma over agency and consent, and he was going to be a complete goddamned _wreck._

Even though Kate had done her best to signal her consent, insofar as giving consent had been possible once the fever had hit. Even though Kate had done just as much damage fucking _Luke_ into the mattress as he had done to her. Even though they were both fucking adults, they were in a sexual relationship and had been for a decade, and while what they’d done sure as hell hadn’t been lovemaking they were still very much in love. None of that would matter to Luke because he’d been raised to believe he was responsible for everything and everyone, and his inability to resist the sex pollen – the same sex pollen _Kate_ had failed to resist, as well – would be seen as a personal and inexcusable failing. 

_“Fuuuuuuck,”_ Kate ground out, staggering back over to the mattress and sinking down beside Luke’s still-slumbering form. She ignored, with considerable mental discipline (and maybe a teensy-tiny internal shudder), the unpleasant squelching sensation between her legs. It shouldn’t even have been humanly possible for someone to produce that much semen, and yet, here they were, evidence to the contrary on almost every possible surface. They really _would_ need to burn the cabin down; there was no way any of this was coming clean. 

She needed to call Ardyn, to have her send out a squad – in full hazmat gear – to find and destroy that thatch of … whatever the hell Luke had said the plant was, she couldn’t remember. (She and Luke could burn the cabin down themselves. It would be cathartic.) She needed to call Charlie, to tell him what had happened, because he was so much better at dealing with the fallout than she was. She smashed things down, she didn’t build them up, and after this Luke was going to need _so much_ building up. 

She was a disgusting, sweaty mess, and the thought of pulling on clothing over her raw, chafed skin made her want to cry but there was no way she was leaving the woods in all her naked glory. When she got home, after she’d done her due diligence and contacted the Alliance to handle plant-control, she was going to move into their claw-foot bathtub and no force on the planet was going to stop her. 

Kate reached out and dug under their pile of clothing until she found her cellphone, flipping it around until she could see the face. Her jaw dropped when she saw the date. It was _Monday_ morning. She and Luke had gone into the woods on _Saturday._

They had been fucking for _two goddamn days?_

Well, that explained how dehydrated and hungry she was, and why her cellphone’s battery was down to its last ten percent. Not to mention the twenty missed phone calls and upwards of thirty missed texts. Charlie must be losing his mind with worry; unsurprisingly, most of the missed calls and texts were from him. She and Luke were supposed to have been back home Saturday evening, and instead they’d been holed up in a cabin from Saturday mid-afternoon until early Monday morning. That realization solidified Kate’s belief that it was fortunate she and Luke were the ones who had been caught in the pollen’s blast. While it was almost certainly going to be detrimental to Luke’s mental health – and frankly, she didn’t think she was doing so hot, either – at least the two of them had the physical conditioning to survive it. Anyone else, especially anyone who was just pure human, would probably be dead by now, of dehydration or exhaustion or maybe even just having their poor hearts explode in their chest. 

Kate added bubble-bath and a glass of red wine to her claw-foot bathtub plans. Maybe some chocolate, as well. 

Beside her Luke groaned, one hand coming up to block the early morning sunlight falling in his face. His eyes opened, then closed again, squeezing shut as he let out another pained grunt. Before he could say anything, Kate rubbed her hand over his bare shoulder, over the tattooed Scythian deer whose antlers curved up along his shoulder-blade. 

“We’re okay,” she said, her voice soft, “and I love you.” 

“I love you, too,” Luke replied instinctively, keeping his eyes squeezed shut. He licked his lips and grimaced. “What time is it?” 

Kate looked at her phone and made a face of her own. “Funny you should ask that, love …”


	4. Day 4 - "Human Shield"

**CW:** None, I don’t think, aside from references to blood. I don’t think I even swear in this one.

**Characters:** Kate, Charlie, Luke

When Kate first drifted back to consciousness it happened slowly and gradually, like a piece of wood washing up on the shore, pushed closer to the sand with every fresh wave. She thought she might have fallen asleep at a party: her head was in someone’s lap and that someone was stroking her hair (that _someone_ had better be either Charlie or Luke, because there were only three people on the planet who were allowed to touch her hair and she couldn’t picture her mother at any party _she_ would voluntarily attend). She could hear raised voices, people shouting and laughing and screaming, and there were flashing lights like at a disco, and music, although it was mostly static and she couldn’t make anything out. She had the presence of mind to hope that no one had drawn a dick on her face in Sharpie when she’d passed out, but beyond that she felt warm and safe and like she didn’t have a care in the world. 

As the world came more into focus she realized that the raised voices were a mixture of adult and child, and that no one was laughing – in fact, she could hear people crying, children sniffling. The lights weren’t from a disco ball but were instead the blue and white and red of emergency vehicles, and what she had mistook for music was actually a discordant mix of police radios and walkie-talkies. Her head _was_ in someone’s lap, however, and it was Luke’s worried face that slowly filled her field of vision; he was hunched over her, his hands in her hair, and it always surprised her that he should have such elegant-looking hands. His fingers were long and slender, a faint dusting of dark hair over the knuckles and the backs of his hands, and it didn’t seem possible that someone who spent so much of his life being used as a battering ram should have such graceful, beautiful hands. Charlie’s hands were nothing of the sort: short, blunt, square-fingered, with chewed-on nails despite his best efforts because when he was nervous he bit his fingernails no matter how hard he tried not to. Kate blinked, and realized Charlie’s hands were on her chest and they were covered in blood and – 

_Oh,_ that _hurt._

She opened her mouth, blinking again at the coppery taste on her tongue. It took her a few tries before she managed to mumble, “Wha’ hap’n’d?”

Both Charlie and Luke looked down at her, and the matching expressions of grief and fear made her heart stutter in her chest. Those handsome faces should never look that sad, she decided. Charlie’s mouth was made for smiling, and his teardrop-shaped eyes had little crinkles in the corners whenever he laughed, and maybe Luke didn’t smile nearly enough but even so he was too pretty to wear such sorrow on his face. 

Somewhere in the distance a walkie-talkie gave a shrill screech and both Luke and Charlie winced. Kate couldn’t summon up the energy, although the noise annoyed her, too. In fact, everything was too noisy and too bright, and she thought all the other people should just up and leave, and let her be alone with her boys. She wanted to curl up with them both, snuggle between them in their big king-sized bed, and maybe drift back to sleep for the next week or so. Let the world sort out itself for once. 

“How much do you remember?” Charlie asked her carefully, even as his hands moved over her skin. She saw that her shirt was more or less gone, tattered shreds of cotton hanging to either side of her chest, and oh that was sad, she had _liked_ that T-shirt. She wondered where her jacket had gone, and if it was in the same sorry shape as her shirt. There was a lot of blood, most of it dark and shining wetly under the flashing lights, and Charlie’s hands were glowing a faint golden-green, like peridots, as he used his healing magic on her. It was warm and tingling but there was an undercurrent of pain, too, like her chest was shot full of fire. 

Kate made a face and tried to raise one hand in a gesture of dismissal. Her hand remained limp at her side, her fingers sticky and cold. She didn’t want to admit that she couldn’t remember what had happened, but talking felt like too much effort. 

“A Hunter opened fire on a group of were children,” Charlie informed her, and that explained why both he and Luke looked so unhappy, if a bunch of kids had been shot. But then Charlie kept talking, adding, “You jumped in front of them like a human shield.” 

“Not human,” Kate pointed out, the words coming out slurred and raspy. It was hard to breathe, like there was a huge weight sitting on her chest, and that made it hard to talk. Both Charlie and Luke winced again, and despite the pain Kate made the effort to talk more, wanting to lighten their mood, “Are you sure that was me? That doesn’t sound like something I would do.” 

Charlie huffed out a faint, broken-sounding laugh and Luke’s fingers tightened in her hair, almost to the point of hurting, but the contact was a pleasant distraction from whatever painful thing Charlie was doing to heal her. 

“Are the kids all right?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” Charlie said softly, and his dark-haired head dipped as he let out a quiet sob. “Yeah, they’re fine. Scared, but unhurt. You … You blocked all the shots.” 

“Huh,” Kate said, more bemused than anything else. “Well, how ‘bout that?” 

She wanted to say more, but the weight on her chest was getting heavier, and it felt like her lungs were on fire. Could lungs feel pain? She knew that most internal organs didn’t have pain receptors, or maybe it was just the stomach? She remembered reading somewhere – she couldn’t remember where – about how if you _could_ actually feel your digestive system you would be in constant agony, something about … how it felt to break down food? She couldn’t remember. She wondered if other organs were like that. 

“Katie!” Luke’s voice was urgent as he gave her the gentlest slap imaginable, like he _needed_ the slap to bring her back to herself, but he was afraid to hurt her. That was kind of funny, since technically speaking she was stronger and tougher than him. “Katie, open your eyes!” 

Oh, she’d been drifting. She hadn’t meant to do that. She tried to dredge up a reassuring smile for him, to show him that she was awake and listening, but she wasn’t sure the expression came out right because Luke still looked utterly wrecked. He also looked completely exhausted, and she thought maybe he’d been giving some of his energy to Charlie to help heal her. Or maybe some of the children _had_ actually been hurt and they’d been helping take care of them first, because Kate didn’t particularly care for children but even she understood that in the event of triage they probably needed to be first in line for medical aid. She was pretty tough, so she could wait to be looked over, she was sure of it. 

“Hey,” she said. “I’m good.” Only “good” came out more like “g-g-good,” because her teeth were chattering, and that was kind of funny because she normally ran hot but right now she was freezing. Wasn’t that the stereotype, though? That the woman was the one who was cold all the time while her long-suffering husband had to strip down to socks and underwear just to handle how high she turned the furnace up? That wasn’t how it worked with her and Luke and Charlie. Luke, in particular – he was the one who was cold, who hated _being_ cold. He was always sticking his cold feet on her, because she was like a furnace, and she liked to tease him about how funny it was that she was the one who ran hot when he was the one who’d grown up in northern Ontario. She kind of liked the cooler temperatures, but right now she was too cold, and even with her head in Luke’s lap she was aware of how much heat was being leached out by the ground underneath her, especially since the packed dirt also felt wet. And kind of … sticky? She frowned. Why was she lying in a puddle? Why hadn’t Luke or Charlie moved her someplace dry? That was silly of them. 

Kate opened her mouth to tell them they were both being silly, but the words just wouldn’t come out, and before long the thought drifted away, not important enough to hold onto for more than a few seconds. There was someone else at Charlie’s side, an older woman Kate didn’t recognize, and the woman’s hand was on Charlie’s shoulder, glowing a faint white. Kate frowned at that, then closed her eyes, dismissing it as unimportant. Charlie was gay, he wasn’t going to run off with some random MILF, especially not when Luke was gorgeous and perfect and _right there_ and everyone was looking so sad. 

“You’re pretty,” she slurred up at Luke. ‘Pretty’ wasn’t the right word – it wasn’t big enough to encapsulate how beautiful Luke was. How beautiful he and Charlie _both_ were. It would have to do, however, because she couldn’t think of any better words, and it was important to her that he knew that. “You should take me home.” 

Luke swallowed heavily, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “Yeah,” he rasped out, his voice hoarse like he’d been screaming or crying or something. “I really want to do that, Katie. I really want to take you home. You just hang in there, okay? Charlie’s going to fix you up. You just have to hold on, okay?” 

“M’kay,” Kate said, smiling sleepily up at him. “Hey.” She managed to widen her eyes, and struggled briefly to move into a sitting position. Either her body wouldn’t cooperate or Charlie’s and Luke’s hands on her prevented her from moving – she couldn’t be sure which. “Hey. Are the kids … Are the kids okay?” 

“Yeah, babe,” Luke said, sounding weary. “Yeah, they’re all fine.” 

“Thanks to you,” said the woman with her hand on Charlie’s shoulder. 

“Huh,” Kate said again, closing her eyes. “Well, go me.” She thought she heard Charlie let out another huffed laugh, but she couldn’t be sure. She was already drifting off, and managed to hold onto consciousness long enough to say, “Hey, don’t let anybody draw a dick on my face, ‘kay?” 

Whatever response Charlie or Luke might have made was lost as Kate lost her tenuous grip on cognizance. The wave surged up once more, and like a piece of wood, she drifted back out to sea.


	5. Day 5 - "Gunpoint"

**CW:** blood, threats of violence

**Characters:** Charlie, Luke, Kate

Charlie swallowed heavily as the muzzle of the pistol pressed into the groove of his left temple. The metal was warm against his skin and he could still smell gunpowder, along with whatever oils were used in the gun’s maintenance. He wanted to close his eyes, to step back, to _get away,_ but he believed the gunman when he said he’d shoot Charlie if he moved. The gunman – a small, reedy sorcerer whose only talent lay in the creation of magical barriers – had already proven himself willing to pull the trigger. 

Not five feet away Kate was slumped against the cabin wall, both hands clutched desperately to her stomach. In the darkness of the cabin the blood that spilled between her fingers looked black, a stark contrast against her pale skin. She was swallowing rapidly, the telltale sign of impending vomit, and her breaths were shallow and coming in far too fast. Her eyes, pale blue like a Husky’s, were rapidly glazing over but she tried to hold Charlie’s gaze. He couldn’t fail to notice the pleading in them: he was the healer, she was injured, why _wasn’t_ he rushing to her aid? 

“Please,” he said, swallowing again as his eyes moved back to the gunman. “Please, just let me go to her. To help her.” 

“No,” the gunman snarled. His hand was shaking, and Charlie was genuinely afraid he would pull the trigger by accident. _Again._ “You’re trying to trick me. It won’t work. I’m not falling for it.” 

Across the room, separated from them by the glowing purple barrier that was the gunman’s sole magical gift, Luke growled and paced like a tiger in a cage. The violet light cast strange shadows over the planes of his face, making him seem otherworldly, and although his messy dark hair kept obscuring his face from Charlie’s view Charlie knew the other man’s gaze had to be darting between him and Kate. The argent bonds on Luke’s ring fingers were glowing faintly, a pale silver-blue that warned Charlie Luke was seconds away from summoning forth a weapon of some sort. Luke normally favoured a bastard sword, to make best use of his superior height and reach, but in this instance Charlie could imagine him conjuring something especially vicious, something with spikes or prongs or hooks. Something that would leave a _mark._ Charlie knew Luke could use the weapons summoned by his argent bonds in order to tear the magical barrier down, but there was no way he could do it quickly enough that the sorcerer wouldn’t have time to fire off another shot. With the pistol shoved directly in Charlie’s face, there was no way the man would miss. He’d already shot Kate; Luke wouldn’t risk him also shooting Charlie. At least, Charlie hoped Luke was rational enough to realize this. 

Luke tended to throw rationality out the window when Charlie’s welfare was involved. He could handle – grudgingly – Kate being in danger, because Kate was a soldier, same as Luke. But Charlie wasn’t supposed to be in the line of danger. Charlie was the one who took care of them _after_ the danger had passed. 

“It’s no trick,” Charlie said, keeping his voice as calm and gentle as he knew how. It was the same voice he used to tell the owner’s of his patients that their pet was suffering and needed to be put down, and it made something tight twist in his stomach to realize that. _Please let me get to her before it’s too late. Please don’t make me use this voice on Luke._ “I just want to help her.” 

“I didn’t _mean_ to!” the man said, and where Charlie’s voice was calm and cool the gunman was bordering on hysterical. He waved his free hand in Kate’s direction, his eyes gone so wide Charlie could see the whites all around his watery-brown irises. “I didn’t mean to shoot her!” 

Behind the barrier Luke growled again, barely restraining himself from lunging forward to pound his hands against the magical forcefield. He’d been less than five steps behind when Kate had gotten shot and the sorcerer had thrown up the barrier. If he’d been two steps closer he would have been on the same side of the forcefield as the rest of them. Charlie knew Luke would be blaming himself for this. If he’d been faster, closer, more alert; if he’d been two steps closer Kate wouldn’t have been shot and Charlie wouldn’t have had a gun shoved in his face. 

Charlie preferred to think of it as, if the gunman hadn’t been a colossal coward he wouldn’t have had a gun on him. If he’d been less of an idiot, he wouldn’t have brandished a fully loaded pistol in the direction of someone he hadn’t meant to shoot. If he’d been a better person, instead of someone tempted by the lure of money to use his meagre magic to do evil, none of them would have been in the cabin in the first place. This wasn’t on Luke, or Kate, or Charlie. This was on one weak-willed sorcerer who let greed and cowardice do the thinking for him. 

“I know,” Charlie replied, tone switching to conciliatory in a heartbeat. Talking people down, keeping things calm: he could do this. He was good at this. He wasn’t the fighter that Kate and Luke were, but he excelled in areas where they were weak, and this was one of them. He just needed to keep Luke from escalating things, and keep the gunman from panicking and pulling the trigger a second time, and above all else, keep Kate from bleeding out on the floor less than five feet from where he stood, helpless.

It was funny: usually Kate was the one he had to keep from escalating. Luke was usually the calm one. 

He could see that Kate was struggling to keep her eyes open and fixed on him. Her hands, which had been pressed tightly to the gunshot wound at her abdomen, were falling limp and loose against her sprawled legs. Not for the first time Charlie wished he could heal from a distance, that he didn’t need skin-to-skin contact in order to spill his healing magic into the other person’s body. If he could just _will_ her to stay with him … 

“I know,” he said again, tearing his gaze away from Kate in order to once again meet the gunman’s eyes. He swallowed, his mouth gone dry, and then continued, “I believe you when you say you didn’t mean to shoot Kate. It was an accident. I _believe_ you. But.” He cleared his throat, and poured all the sincerity he could muster into his next few words, “You have a choice now. Shooting Kate was an accident, but if you don’t let me go to her, let me heal her, she’s going to die. And that – her death” – he heard Luke’s hitched breath and prayed the other man wasn’t about to try tearing the wall down in order to get to them – “will be on you. It will be because you _made the choice_ not to let me help her. Hurting Kate was an accident. Killing her will be a choice.” 

The man let out a keening noise, the pistol jamming painfully against Charlie’s temple, and for one brief, terrifying instant he was certain the sorcerer was about to pull the trigger. Instead the sorcerer suddenly drew back and levelled the gun at the floor, taking a step away in order to let Charlie hurry past him to where Kate lay. 

Charlie didn’t stop to think. He bolted from his position, closing those less than five feet to drop to his knees beside Kate. Her eyes were sliding closed, her chin resting on her chest as her head lolled forward. She was still breathing, though, her breaths coming in more like gasps than steady inhalations. Those weak, raspy gasps were the most beautiful sound in the world because they meant she was still alive. 

“Katie,” he murmured, hands coming up to press against her abdomen, where the blood was hot and slick. She whimpered, a noise more akin to animalistic keening than something that should have come out of a human’s mouth. “It’s okay, Katie-Kate, I’ve got you.” 

He spared barely no attention for the armed man behind him, but he could hear the sorcerer rambling, trying to convince them – or perhaps trying to convince himself – that he’d done good in letting Charlie go to Kate, that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, and that everything would be fine now. Charlie wanted to jump back to his feet and ring the man’s scrawny neck, but all his focus was on Kate and the healing magic pooling forth between his fingertips. 

“See?” the sorcerer whined, and from the sound of things he was pacing back and forth. “I didn’t hurt you, you can save her, you don’t have to hurt me!” 

The grievous wound in Kate’s abdomen began to knit together as a new sound – new, yet familiar – came from behind them. Charlie felt the familiar sensation as of an air pressure change as Luke summoned forth weapons from the magical rings he wore on his fingers, the rings that marked him as one of the Knights of Oberon. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Charlie said, smiling faintly as Kate’s breathing began to steady. He heard a startled yelp from behind him and knew that Luke had torn through the barrier and was no doubt closing the very short distance between himself and the sorcerer. He didn’t need to turn around to know what was about to happen, so he kept his focus on Kate, on healing her, instead of watching Luke mete out justice to the man who had harmed so many others but who had, most importantly to Luke, harmed _Kate_ and threatened Charlie. 

“But _he_ is.”


	6. Day 6 - "Dragged Away"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for minimal editing on this one, but I’ve hemmed and hawed over it long enough, I think. I dunno, I’m not super thrilled with it.

**CW:** spiders

**Characters:** Kate, Lauren, Devon

There was a draft coming from somewhere overhead. It blew cold, damp air along the back of Kate’s neck and smelled like old mothballs. None of the others seemed to pick it up, but trying to track its source was starting to make Kate feel like a crazy person. She’d mentioned the draft a few times, hoping one of the others would feel what she was feeling, but even when Devon had joined Kate at the back of the line she hadn’t been able to feel or hear the breeze. 

She could tell the others were starting to think of her as being twitchy and jumpy, and she wanted to tell them all to fuck off, but there was that lingering worry that she really was her mother’s daughter that kept her from saying anything. 

The decommissioned mine was creepy enough without random errant drafts adding to the general ambience. As a rule Kate wasn’t easily unsettled, but between the tight spaces, the darkness and now this persistent, annoying breeze, she was starting to feel genuinely freaked out and was more than ready for their team to cut their losses and head back to the surface. Except that in this case “cutting their losses” meant abandoning a group of missing schoolchildren, and if _she_ was scared she couldn’t begin to imagine what those kids must be feeling. She was willing to bet that when the kids’ parents had signed the permission slips for this particular field trip they hadn’t counted on it including getting lost in one of the many abandoned mine shafts up in northern Ontario. 

Normally search and rescue was more Luke’s gig than Kate’s, especially when it involved mundane humans instead of other supernaturals. Luke even had the proper certifications and everything, whereas Kate just had the ability to shapeshift into something that could track by scent and what her mother had referred to as a ridiculous amount of stubbornness. But Luke and Rishaan, his usual SAR buddy, were both big guys and the mines’ state of disrepair made the tunnels narrower than would be feasible for them to climb through. Kate, Devon and Lauren were all small enough that they could be expected to squeeze into the same spaces the children had disappeared into. 

Kate would have preferred to have Luke there, but he wasn’t a fan of small spaces, and in any case there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of him being able to fit his broad shoulders through some of these passages. As it was Devon’s stockier build made some of the narrow passages an tight fit, and Lauren had to bend over to duck through the lower sections of tunnel. Kate was short and built more like a gymnast, and she had the added benefit of being able to shift into something smaller if she needed to squeeze through. Realistically, Kate was the only one who could move somewhat comfortably through the abandoned mine shafts and was the closest in size to the missing children (a fact that disgruntled her considerably every time Lauren or Dev brought it up), but it wasn’t safe for anyone to travel through the mines alone. Kate was also the only member of the three-woman team who was able to use her own magic in order to see in the darkness, shifting her eyes into those of a creature better suited for low-light vision – in this case, an owl – whereas both Devon and Lauren were using magical charms to grant themselves the ability to see. The witch responsible for making the charms was someone Kate knew and trusted (although it wasn’t Charlie, who specialized in other forms of magic), but she much preferred relying on her own abilities than trusting in someone else’s magic. 

Devon, who had resumed her position in the lead after determining that she couldn’t find the source of Kate’s mysterious draft, paused as she brought them to another T-junction. They had a map – an old, well-worn paper map that Roxanne had managed to dig up out of nowhere – but many of the marked passages were long gone thanks to cave-ins or simple errors in cartography, and for the most part they were relying upon Dev’s excellent sense of direction, even underground. (The recurring joke being that Devon, who was both short and stout, was in fact a dwarf. The only thing she was lacking was the beard. That, and Lauren couldn’t remember there being any Black dwarves in Middle Earth.) 

“Left or right?” Lauren asked, turning her head in either direction. Her eyes, like Devon’s, glowed in the dark, the result of Andrew’s magic. To Kate’s own enhanced vision it made their faces – especially Lauren’s lighter skin – seem to glow as well. 

Dev consulted the map, just as Kate felt another blast of cold air down the back of her neck. More annoyed by her inability to track down the source of the draft than unsettled by its continuing presence, Kate turned, scowling, and scanned the nearby rocky surfaces for some indication of where the draft could be coming from. Owl’s vision was designed mostly to pick up ambient light and amplify it, rather than to detect and distinguish between colours, so her world was limited to pale shades of green with brighter flashes where the light shone. The walls of the mine shaft were a flat, dull green, with darker pits where the stone was cracked and split; it was difficult for her to discern the difference between stone and the wood supports that held the mine together. She could see dark splotches that she knew were deeper holes in the stone, but she couldn’t make out the depth, or whether or not the holes led anywhere. The only thing she could do was to move her hand closer to see if she could feel cold air coming through. If there was such a hole, however, it was possible that the children might have crawled inside in an effort to find their way out of the shafts – or in order to hide themselves. 

Just as she was about to turn her attention back to Devon and the map, Kate caught sight of a deep pit in the stone a few inches above where the top of Lauren’s head might have reached. The pit was small – too small for Lauren or Dev to fit in – but it might just be large enough for a little kid to crawl inside. Waving her hand in front of the opening, she was pleased to detect a faint brush of cold air, along with that strange mothball odour she had noticed earlier. 

“Hey, guys!” she called, moving closer. “I think I –” 

A dark blur suddenly appeared directly in front of her face, her night-vision rendering it mostly featureless. She tried to scramble backwards but something slammed into her, throwing her back into the rocky wall behind her. Her head cracked against stone just as all the air was forced out of her lungs and for a moment her world went completely dark. 

Something sharp sank into the skin where her shoulder and neck joined, and before she could even try to fight it off she felt stinging heat flood into her body. Almost immediately her body went limp, her limbs refusing to respond to her brain’s attempts at rallying a defense. She opened her mouth to cry out for help only to find herself flipped over, facedown in the dirt, her right cheek scraping painfully against the rock. 

There was something large and heavy standing over her, but she couldn’t lift her head to see what it was. Whatever poison the creature had injected her with was fast-acting: her veins felt like they were on fire even as a strange lassitude filled her body. She felt wiry hairs brush against her face and saw, in extreme close-up, the long, furred leg of … _something_ … move beside her head. Above her she heard a soft hissing sound; beyond that, she could hear Devon and Lauren shouting, but she was having trouble making out what they were saying. Screams, mostly, she thought. 

Kate was flipped again, this time feeling something dense and sticky winding its way around her body, like thick strands of syrupy rope that originated from her ankles and made their way up almost to her hips. As she again landed on her back – breath knocked out of her a second time – she found herself facing the underbelly of a giant spider the size of her dog. This time, when Kate opened her mouth it was to scream as primitive, visceral horror set off every fight or flight instinct she possessed. 

The spider hissed again and lunged, its sharp fangs tearing into Kate’s shoulder, inches away from where it had originally bit her. The pain was like nothing she had ever experienced before, liquid fire that rocketed her body into a sort of panicked overload where the overwhelming sensation left her utterly incapable of doing anything but screaming, high-pitched, hysterical and filled with anguish. 

The rope – _the webbing,_ Kate realized with mounting horror – stretched up over Kate’s midsection as the spider flipped her again, this time continuing to spin her from back to front and then back again several times so that it could wind her up in its web. Her face cracked against the stone floor again but the pain was scarcely a dull ache in comparison to the agony in her shoulder. 

She knew she was hyperventilating but was utterly powerless to get her breathing under control. She was pretty sure her body was going into shock, and there was a part of her that thought losing consciousness might be a pleasant escape from her present circumstances. And yet she couldn’t seem to lose that last tenuous grip on reality. Her instinct was to fight, but with her body wound in tight, sticky webbing and paralyzing poison flooding her veins she couldn’t summon the strength to do more than try and force herself to continue breathing. 

Another angry hiss, followed by a dull, meaty thump as something struck the spider’s side. Kate heard Dev shouting furiously, and for a brief moment she thought help was on the way. Then the spider suddenly skittered backwards and _upwards,_ into the dark pit she had spotted earlier – and there was a vicious yank at her ankles as the webbing that bound her hauled into the darkness along after it.


	7. Day 7 - "Isolation"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hadn’t actually planned on writing about this part of Luke’s life. I knew, in a vague sort of way, what had happened to this character prior to the beginning of my story, but it wasn’t ever anything I felt needed to be written down. In writing this – from the point of view of the child experiencing it – I got to have a better idea of what Luke went through, how he processed it, and how he internalized it.
> 
> The whump in this ficlet is purely emotional/psychological, but it packs a wallop nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one comes with some pretty heavy content warnings in the form of child abuse, child neglect, and sexual grooming of a child – very non-explicit (and definitely not understood by the POV character), but very obvious if you know what to look for. There are a lot of very strong implications that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. Absolutely nothing explicit happens in this ficlet but it could be triggering for some readers, so please proceed with caution.

**CW:** child abuse, child neglect, sexual grooming, inappropriate behaviour of an adult toward a minor (non-graphic). The fact that he doesn't know he's being abused doesn't mean it's not abuse or it's not happening.

**Character:** Luke

He hated it when his parents went away. It was even worse when they took his siblings with them. Danny was away at boarding school, of course, but Mama and Papa could have left Ally and Millie behind to keep him company. He could be a good big brother to them the way Danny was with him. Besides, they weren’t _babies,_ Luke knew how to take care of an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old. He was almost _eleven,_ for goodness sake! Practically a _teenager._

Mama and Papa had business in Toronto, though, and while Mama didn’t like being parted from her girls Papa thought it would be good experience for Luke to be alone and in charge of the house. Mr. Sleswick was there, if Luke needed anything; Luke just had to go out to the guest house to find him. 

Mr. Sleswick was part of the problem, not that Luke was going to say anything. Everybody liked Mr. Sleswick. He was smart and funny and Papa said he was one of the best Knights in the history of the Order. He gave Ally and Millie airplane rides that made them squeal with laughter and he always had treats in his pockets to give to Danny and Luke, and when he’d first arrived he’d been the first real adult to think Luke was worth paying any attention to. Most adults only ever bothered with Danny, because he was the oldest and he was going to grow up to be the best Knight of Oberon _ever,_ and people were already commenting on how pretty Ally was and how much she took after Mama. And Millie was _four,_ so everything she did was adorable and entertaining. Luke was just … Luke. He was small for his age and kind of clumsy and his father was forever getting angry with him because he couldn’t manage to get his footwork right. _“What are you going to do the first time a fomoir charges you, you clumsy idiot? Trip over your own feet? Stab yourself with your own sword? Honestly, Lukas,_ pay attention!” Luke knew he wasn’t worth the adults’ time, and that made Mr. Sleswick’s interest in him such a warm, welcoming thing, even after Danny had started saying he didn’t like the older man. 

At first Luke had been certain that Danny was just jealous. Mr. Sleswick thought Luke was more interesting than him, and that _never_ happened. Then Danny went away to boarding school and Papa and Mama started having to go to Toronto for business, and while most of the time they left their three youngest children behind, more and more often lately it had just been Luke, so that Mr. Sleswick could help him work on his forms. Officially Mr. Sleswick was too important to waste his time teaching the awkward youngest son of the local Order’s secretary, but Mr. Sleswick liked working with Luke. At least, that’s what he always told Papa, when Papa expressed his frustration and amazement at Mr. Sleswick’s patience with Luke. 

Now Papa and Mama were gone, and Ally and Millie with them, and Luke was alone in the big old house and there was a storm outside. And he wasn’t scared, exactly. Not of _storms,_ anyway. But the house was creepy, especially at night, and the knowledge that Mr. Sleswick was just in the guest house nearby if he needed him was … not comforting, in the least. 

Mama had left him a list of things he needed to do for the two days he was on his own. Luke took care to check off each task as he accomplished it – _Work on his handwriting:_ Check! _Do 5 laps around the grounds:_ Check! _Make his bed:_ Check! – and he was hopeful that when his parents came back he would get a treat for being so diligent. (Hopeful, but he didn’t expect anything. The last time his parents were gone they didn’t check in with him for three days after they got back, and by then they didn’t care whether his chores were done or not. Luke wasn’t even sure they had missed him in their absence.) He had made himself dinner – a sleeve of crackers and an apple, because Mama locked the fridge and cupboards while they were away in case the servants might steal any of their good food. He was still hungry, but he drank a lot of water and that sort of made up for it. Except that it also made him have to pee a lot, and that meant he had to leave his hiding place, which he didn’t like doing. Leaving his hiding place risked Mr. Sleswick finding it, and then he’d have to find a _new_ place to hide, and the servants thought it was just a silly game so they would tell on him to Mr. Sleswick instead of keeping his hiding places secret. 

Luke wasn’t allowed to ask the servants for anything. They worked for his _parents,_ not for him. He could make his own bed and his own meals and anyway his parents were only gone for two days, so it’s not like he would be expected to figure out how to use the laundry machines or how to clean the house or anything. Making his bed and scrabbling together whatever food he could scavenge (that wasn’t locked away – he’d meant to hide some things _before_ his parents left, like a can of Alphagetti as a treat and maybe some cookies), that was _easy._ That was _baby_ stuff. He could do it, no problem. He didn’t need Mr. Sleswick’s help for any of it. 

He didn’t think he needed Mr. Sleswick’s help for his fighting forms, either. Honestly, Luke didn’t even think Mr. Sleswick was teaching him right. Not like how Papa showed him, or his teachers at school. But Mr. Sleswick was a lot older than him and a lot better at fighting than him – everybody said so – so maybe there was a trick to his methods that Luke just didn’t understand. And while Luke wasn’t entirely comfortable with how hands-on Mr. Sleswick was, at least when Luke messed up his forms – like _always_ – Mr. Sleswick didn’t yell at him or hit him. Luke just couldn’t quite figure out why it made him feel more uncomfortable to have Mr. Sleswick pet him or hug him when he did well than it did when Papa slapped him or hit him with the belt for screwing up. 

The storm outside was picking up, and Luke wasn’t _scared,_ but he didn’t _like_ it. The old house creaked and groaned on the best of days, but on the bad weather days the wind made the shutters rattle and the house was extra drafty. He’d spent most of the day tucked up in the linen closet on the second floor, up on the top shelf where Mama kept the good towels. He had a flashlight and a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales (which, in hindsight, was maybe a little _too_ scary for a stormy night, even if he normally loved all the gory bits, like Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters cutting off pieces of their feet so they could fit into the glass slipper or birds pecking their eyes out). He’d eaten his apple slowly, following up each bite with a sip of water, but now he had to pee and that would mean abandoning his hiding spot and hoping neither Mr. Sleswick nor the servants figured out where it was before he could come back to it. 

Cautiously Luke climbed down from the closet shelves. His papa was always telling him how clumsy he was, but he had always been really good at climbing. Shelves, jungle gyms, trees, you name it, he could climb it. He poked his head out of the closet and saw that the hallway was dark. His parents only left the night-lights on for his sisters; Luke was a big boy and shouldn’t need them. Closing the door carefully – it had a squeaky hinge that would squeal if you didn’t close it right – he turned and crept down the hallway towards one of the upstairs bathrooms. Technically speaking he was only allowed to use the bathroom attached to his bedroom or the one downstairs, off the kitchen, but the upstairs bathroom was closer to his hiding place, and the less time he spent away from his sanctum the less likely it was anyone would find it. 

Luke didn’t bother to turn the light on in the bathroom, he just closed the door quietly behind him and used the flashes of lightning from outside to direct himself to the toilet. Unconsciously he counted the beats between the thunder and the lightning – _One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus_ – and judged the storm to be getting closer. He wondered if it would knock the power out. On the one hand, that would be bad, because it would shut the security off in the house, and then Papa would be mad when he got home. (Luke didn’t know how to reset the security – Papa didn’t think he was old enough or smart enough to learn – but Papa didn’t like it when the security systems shut down and had to be reset because it took a lot of time, time he could spend doing better things.) On the other hand, if the power went out then the house would be even darker, and Luke would have an easier time hiding. Plus there was always something thrilling about a storm so powerful it could knock out the island’s hydro, because Papa always said they had the best system in the county. _“Not like the mainlanders, who have to rely on the city utilities to get everything done!”_ Papa and Mama were both always very proud about how they had the best of everything: the best house, the best cars, the best positions within the Order, the best children. That was why Mr. Sleswick was staying with them, because they had the nicest guest house and the most efficient staff. The fact that he was so gracious as to offer to help teach their sons – well, just the one son, now that Danny was away at school – how to fight like a real warrior was just icing on the cake, as far as Luke’s parents were concerned, because now Luke had the best trainer, too, and all for the inconvenience of having the man stay in their guest house. And that was hardly an inconvenience at all, since Mr. Sleswick mostly took care of himself, and whatever he couldn’t manage, the servants dealt with. 

Luke was just finishing up when the bathroom door suddenly burst open with such force that it slammed into the opposite wall, startling Luke so badly he jumped and peed a little on the floor. He yelped, torn between trying to cover himself up, clean up the mess he’d just made, or finish peeing in the bowl as Mr. Sleswick barged into the bathroom. In the end he didn’t have a whole lot of choice: it was either pee in the bowl or continue peeing on his foot, and it was bad enough that he’d already made a mess on the floor like a baby. 

“Mr. Sleswick!” he protested, cheeks flaming as the older man turned on the bathroom light, flooding the little room with soft illumination – and highlighting the mess. “You scared me!” Luke tried covering his bare bum with one hand, the other hand still directing his flow into the bowl. He hadn’t yet mastered the art of peeing without dropping his pants onto the floor; Ally made fun of him (as if _she_ was any better – she kept having to change her underwear because of accidents, and she was _eight!_ That was _so old!),_ but it was hard to coordinate the whole affair. 

Mr. Sleswick laughed, and it was that laugh that Luke hated, the one that most people thought sounded warm and friendly but was actually kind of mean underneath. “Don’t be silly, Lukas, you don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.” Then he chuckled and made a show of trying to peek around Luke, as if to peer down at him. “Unless you’ve got some extra bits I don’t know about? Is that it, Lukas? Are you hiding something?” 

“N-no, sir!” Luke stammered out, and managed to quickly finished up and tuck himself back into his pants. He realized, with a sort of fragile dismay, that he hadn’t given himself a little shake and he’d probably have a wet spot on the front of his pants later, but he decided a wet spot was preferable to Mr. Sleswick making bad jokes at the sight of his bum. 

Mr. Sleswick’s hand came down heavily on Luke’s shoulder, and it took everything in him not to flinch. That would hurt Mr. Sleswick’s feelings, and he would want to know why Luke didn’t like him, or if Luke was afraid of him. And Luke _wasn’t._ Mr. Sleswick was always really nice to him and paid him so much more attention than Papa or Mama or any of his instructors. He should be grateful to have the attention of an important man like him, not jumping and hiding himself away just because he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Mr. Sleswick’s interest. 

“I’m just teasing you, Lukas,” Mr. Sleswick said, his voice filled with good humour. He squeezed Luke’s shoulder. “You don’t have to be so serious all the time, Gloomy Gus. Now c’mon, I was going to show you how to block that strike I used on you yesterday, remember?” 

“Yes, sir,” Luke said obediently. He started to head for the door, then turned and used some toilet paper to mop up the spill on the floor. He peeled off his sock, the one he’d accidentally peed on, and shoved it and its mate down the laundry chute, hoping the servants wouldn’t notice that his socks smelled like pee. Then Luke quickly washed his hands. He _did_ want to learn how to block Mr. Sleswick’s strike; it had been some weird overhand hit that had left Luke sprawled on his bum on the ground, which he hadn’t enjoyed _at all._ If he could learn how to block it, then maybe he could apply that learning to other similar hits, and then maybe he wouldn’t always get knocked down. And then maybe Papa wouldn’t be so angry about what a bad fighter he was. Maybe he’d even learn something new that he could show Papa and Mama, to make them proud of him! 

“Good boy, Lukas,” Mr. Sleswick said, giving Luke’s shoulder another, longer squeeze. Something about that made Luke’s tummy twist, but he didn’t know whether it was the touch or the way Mr. Sleswick seemed to linger over his name. The apple he’d savoured while hidden away inside the closet suddenly felt leaden and heavy inside his stomach, and Luke thought he tasted bile in the back of his throat but he tried to dismiss the sensation. 

There was another brilliant flash of lightning followed by a huge crash that made Luke jump. The bathroom light flickered and there was a slight buzzing sound, as if the lights were about to go out. Mr. Sleswick gave Luke a comforting pat on the back as he ushered him out into the hallway, in the direction of the training room. 

“Maybe if the power goes out we can build a fort in the living room,” Mr. Sleswick suggested, and Luke smiled at that, thinking of all the times he and his older brother Danny had done that very thing. Mr. Sleswick continued, “We could make popcorn in the fireplace and tell scary ghost stories and huddle together in the fort. Wouldn’t that be fun, Lukas?” 

“Yes sir,” Luke said again, even as his stomach gave another painful twist. He let Mr. Sleswick lead him away, but a part of him was thinking that maybe it would have been better if he’d just stayed hidden up inside the linen closet. He’d thought, back when Mr. Sleswick started paying attention to him, that it would be nice to have an adult make a fuss over him the way they all did for his siblings, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was better to be alone and ignored.


End file.
